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Astrophysics > Earth and Planetary Astrophysics

Title:Identifying Non-Resonant Kepler Planetary Systems

Abstract: The Kepler mission has discovered a plethora of multiple transiting planet
candidate exosystems, many of which feature putative pairs of planets near mean
motion resonance commensurabilities. Identifying potentially resonant systems
could help guide future observations and enhance our understanding of planetary
formation scenarios. We develop and apply an algebraic method to determine
which Kepler 2-planet systems cannot be in a 1st-4th order resonance, given the
current, publicly available data. This method identifies when any potentially
resonant angle of a system must circulate. We identify and list 70
near-resonant systems which cannot actually reside in resonance, assuming a
widely-used formulation for deriving planetary masses from their observed radii
and that these systems do not contain unseen bodies that affect the
interactions of the observed planets. This work strengthens the argument that a
high fraction of exoplanetary systems may be near resonance but not actually in
resonance.